Arasangam - review

May 12, 2008

Gaeb10 vijaykanth is a much maligned actor, who has a habit of coming up with decent movies now and then. All that the director has to make a decent movie out of Gaeb10 is shut him up and reduce his dialogue by a factor ten. RamaNa and Perarasu (which is infact a good thriller movie) have the same thing in common - he speaks very very less. Arasangam is in the same mould - at least till the interval. The first half is a taut attempt at recreating the ambience of pulanvisaraNai. Despite gaeb10's numerous attempts at sabotaging the movie by speaking in English, explaining encryption/decryption, romancing a deaf girl (the director must be sending some message to gaeb10 by giving him a deaf wife), the screenplay moves in a steady pace and arrives at the obligatory twist at the interval.

And rapidly goes downhill from there. Apparently for no reason, Gaeb10 goes to Canada chasing Mukul Dev (who along with a lot of other Gaeb10 movie oldies - ravichandran, sriman, riyaz khan - has been given a chance to star in the film) and starts imitating Kamal in Vettayadu Vilayadu. After some funny (unintentional) scenes where Gaeb10 is reduced to fighting pigs (Director R Mathesh must have seen hannibal in full mabbu and decided this scene was worth stealing), he returns to India and his Vallarasu/Narasimma ways, jumps into (yes into, not on) moving trains, mouths more tech babble, makes some sacrifices and finally cleans the world of the sarvadesa theeviravadhis'. All the while, he has given Director R Mathesh the chance to prove he has watched Die Hard 4 and his fans some arasiyal dialogue and finally gave me a chance to get a headache on a saturday morning.

PS : None of the figures in the movie were worth watching. Especially considering the fact that i persuaded three young subordinates to chose this film over the slasher-thriller-cleavage-show flick silandhi

Sorry, this is not a comment on this post, but a response to your comment on my blog.

Thanks for the comment on my book review of Curry. So you mean to say British tea marketing is a documented fact. It was news to me, at least. Where can I get to read Ki. Rajanarayanan. I cant read Tamil, so is there a translation available?